Innocent
by ThePatriot
Summary: A marine's remarks on the war...


A/N: This song impressed me so much I wrote a fic about it. Nothing major, just a quick bit of Marine narrative. I little harsh language to give it some personality, you've been warned.  
  
Innocent  
  
Satan, you know where I lie Gently I go into that good night All our lives get complicated Search for pleasures overrated Never armed our souls For what the future would hold When we were innocent  
  
Angels lend me your might Forfeit all my lives to get just one right All those colors long since faded All our smiles all confiscated Never were we told We'd be bought and sold When we were innocent  
  
This prayer is for me tonight This far down that line and still ain't got it right And while confessions not yet stated Our next sin is contemplated Never did we know What the future would hold Or that we'd be bought and sold We were innocent  
  
We were the class of 29'. The last class to march out the doors of OCS before the war. I say were, because there are only ninety of us left. We marched into Officer Candidate School proud to serve our country and our leaders. We weren't drafted or conscripted, we came willingly. Some of thought we owed our country, some of us thought we could make a career out of the Corps, some came looking for adventure or glory. Our innocence was total and complete, I look back at our class pictures and you can almost see the innocence radiating off our young faces in a pale light, like ghosts that haven't realized they're dead yet. We would lose that soon enough, it would be shed on a thousand different battlefields around the Confederation.  
  
We spent the days firing blanks at each other, running up and down the hills of Korhal in assault marches and battle formations, confident that we were preparing for war that we all knew would never happen. We studied the necessary history, battles like Pearl Harbor, The Tet Offensive, The First Chinese War. We expected at the most to fight a few skirmishes with some rebels and pirates, then move on to bigger and better things. We were fools  
  
1,000 freshly minted Second Lieutenants marched out of OCS in full dress uniform, with our swords and officer's caps. The news reported a new alien species found on several planets, we remained in blissful ignorance for a few more days. We were distributed to various marine units, some were given rifle platoons, others went into the Artillery or Armor, the Corps was smaller back then and almost all replacements went into combat arms. We arrived at our units and barely had enough time to get to know the men around us before we started dieing among them.  
  
The Zerg attacked, no one knows exactly how many died in the opening days of the First Zerg Offensive. The estimates range from an unbelievably low 15,000 to a believable 100,000. The 2nd Marine Division was wiped out to the last man by the Zerg swarm on Mar Tag, with it went ninety of our classmates and friends, pinned on planet by the Zerg swarms, the entire division fought and died in the course of less than twenty hours. Along with the 2nd went Chau Sara, fried by the Protoss, and so many others. Soon hot spots were erupting everywhere, the Marine Corps, still unsure of how to deal with this threat, tossed units at the Zerg piecemeal. A company wiped out here, two battalions there. My own unit had dead marines stacked up like cordwood, we couldn't get the dead out, we had wounded filling every available space, so we simply left them there to rot. All the values we were taught, never leave a man behind, never retreat and all the other bullshit they had taught us disappeared in the chaos and reality of combat. We just learned to survive, and marines kept dieing left and right, torn and blasted apart. We tried to lead them, but there wasn't much leading to be done when your fucking brass keeps ordering frontal [assaults] everywhere they can since they don't have the time or inclination to figure out what they're dealing with. If your unit couldn't attack, they let you die in place, a road bump for the Zerg on some god forsaken planet that no one has ever, or will hear of. More of us died.  
  
The class of '29 was in its first war, and in seventy two hours it was down to seventy-five percent strength. Eventually the Corps got its act together, too fucking late to save a couple hundred thousands people but who gives the fuck about them anyway? We managed to fight them to a stand still somewhere near Mar Tag, where the 2nd was annihilated. And that's the way it's been ever since. The grunts kept dieing, we died trying to lead them. The poetic say we died as brothers, the political say we died for a cause. The realist say we died for the survival of our species, I say we just died, and anyone who tries to attach something to it hasn't seen the ass end of a battlefield after a couple hundred men have died on it. There isn't any rhyme or reason, just bodies, shredded by acid spines or torn apart. Limbs lay like fallen branches, the wounded scream in a voice that isn't really human. There isn't anything meaningful or heroic, it's a bunch of dead and dieing people and your glad it isn't you, because you figure the way this fucking war is being run, your gonna be one of them soon enough.  
  
New marines were rushed through OCS and Basic training, filling the gaps in the ranks that could never really be filled. In four months of fighting the class of '29 was a shadow of its former self. The men who survived look about eighty. Once smiling faces are no longer smiling, those that still have faces look like they have aged about ninety years, and in fact we have. We have matured in one but one area, death. We can kill in hundreds of different ways, with Impalers, Canister rifles, machine guns, nukes, I can call in an air strike that can level a jungle. I can watch the head on the man next to me turn into a fine pink mist and not react at all. We are barely old enough to shave.  
  
And the bodies keep piling up, we take the same ground we took two days ago, and that the Zerg pushed us off yesterday. Each attack is given some recycled code name that's already been used at least twice. Victories are where we kill more of them then they do of us. We are never defeated, we simply 'displace to a location that better suits our tactical needs' if you ask the Brass we have a string of victories that goes back to the beginning of the war. And the fighting and dieing continues.  
  
We are now four years into the war. I'm a major, most my surviving classmates are too, all ninety of us. The war will keep dragging on, the remaining remnants of the class of '29 will be KIA or just simply maimed for life. So, until they zip what's left of my body up in a body bag, I can still remember unlike the others who came after us, rushed into a war of which they had less preparation for then we did, back before the Zerg, before the Protoss and before the war to a time when we were youthful and free. When we were innocent.  
  
Letter found on the body of Major Arthur Right, 5th Battalion, Eighth Marines, USMC KIA on 4-2-32, Operation Mako IV  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
We were innocent. 


End file.
